1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing device such as a printer, a method of instructing printing for making a printing device print print data, and a device for instructing printing to which the method of instructing printing is applied.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, when printing is carried out at a printing device such as a printer, generally, print data is transmitted from a host device such as a personal computer (PC) or the like connected to the printing device, via a printer driver provided at the host device. In this case, when, for example, a user gives an instruction at the host device to print print data which has been prepared by a desired application, a printer driver, which corresponds to the arbitrary printer from which the user wishes to output, is called up, and the print data is converted into a predetermined control code such as PDL (Page Description Language) or the like which the printer can interpret, and the converted data is outputted to the printer. Further, the user can designate, by the printer driver, printing conditions for the print data, such as the sheet size, the number of sheets to be outputted, the number of sets to be outputted, whether printing is to be double-sided or single-sided printing, whether sorting is to be carried out or not, and the like. The print data can thereby be outputted in a desired format.
However, in the user interface (UI) screen at the time of setting the printing conditions at the printer driver described above, usually, setting of the printing conditions is carried out by switching between plural screens by using tabs or the like. It is extremely difficult to understand at what positions, on the UI screen of the printer driver, the places for setting the desired functions of the UI screen are located at. Further, the structure of the UI screen of a printer driver differs for each printer manufacturer. Thus, when operating a printer driver which one is usually not accustomed to, it is even more difficult to understand at what positions, on the UI screen of the printer driver, the places for setting the functions are at. Moreover, attempts have been made to apply printer drivers, which are used in conventional PCs or the like, as is to mobile terminals such as cellular phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) or the like. In such cases, because the display screen of the cellular phone or the mobile terminal is much smaller than that of a PC, the entire UI screen of the printer driver cannot be appropriately displayed within the region of the display screen. Accordingly, there are cases in which the operability severely deteriorates. Thus, it has been thought to divide the screen structure even more finely than that of a printer driver for a PC, such that display is possible even at a cellular phone or a mobile terminal. However, if the screen structure becomes too fine, in such cases as well, the operability may deteriorate severely.